If you innovate in the wrong way, you can end up running around like a headless chicken, surprised each time all your great ideas don’t develop into fortunes. If your aim is not well defined from the start, the process ends up being hard and expensive instead of fun and playful.

So you’re right, Eva – innovation is not rocket science. But it does take guts and honesty. Companies need to ask themselves some difficult questions before they start ‘innovating’. What do you expect from innovation? What are the success criteria? What is the big dream that you hope innovation can realise for you?

A failure to ask these questions and take an honest approach towards innovation can lead to all your good ideas collapsing. Many companies create talented internal innovation teams or go to successful innovation consultancies and say: ‘lets innovate, let’s change the world’! But because the company isn’t clear about their innovation objectives, managers respond by shaking their heads and saying: ‘it looks really great, but it’s not really our core business’ or ‘we don’t know how to do that’ or ‘maybe in another life’. After six months, what started out being fun and challenging is now hard and expensive.

To do real innovation, you need to start right. Ask the questions. Define why you want to innovate. And create a culture in you company from top to bottom. Innovation should be a way of thinking and dreaming that all employees are comfortable expressing. If you generate this company culture, ideas will grow and radical changes will take place in company competences, technology and resources. To embrace these radical changes, you must be ready to stray from your normal path and head into totally new areas of business.

True innovation brings radical change. Innovation should be a fun and playful experience. But if your company is not ready to take that deep dive into innovation, it will not be a journey of joy but one of frustration.

So before you invest more time in innovation, ask yourself why you want to innovate. If the answer is ‘new business opportunities’, you are ready for the journey. But if the answer is ‘competitive advantage in core business’ or ‘increased market share’, there are much more effective ways of achieving this but innovation is not one of them.